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Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I'll go there." This is his way of giving impressiveness to the "veiled period" of the following seven or eight years, for the benefit of those who had read "The Zincali" and "The Bible in Spain," and had been allured by the hints of earlier travel.
On another occasion he praises her for more general qualities, when he compares her to the good wife of the Triad, the perfect woman endowed with all the feminine virtues. His wife and "old Hen." After his return to Seville, early in January, Borrow proceeded to get his "papers into some order." There seems no doubt that this meant preparing The Zincali for publication.
It was the first work of a diffident, inexperienced man, who, mistrusting his own powers, hoped to conciliate critics by leaning on Spanish historians and Gypsy poets." Nevertheless, "The Zincali" is a book that is still valuable for these two separate elements of personality and extraordinary observation.
Knapp, while the most unanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented. For instance, at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman who read ‘Zincali’ for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, as though he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:—
This letter, which was afterwards printed in the "Athenaeum," and incorporated in "The Zincali," mentions the Gypsies who have become successful singers and married noblemen, but continues: "It is not, however, to be supposed that all the female Gypsies are of this high, talented and respectable order: amongst them are many low and profligate females, who sing at taverns or at the various gardens in the neighbourhood, and whose husbands and male connexions subsist by horse jobbing and like kinds of traffic.
Borrow, who was now in his thirty-eighth year, set to work at Oulton upon his “Bible in Spain,” which was published by Mr. John Murray, three years later, in 1843. Of his method, or lack of method, in working, something may be gathered from the preface to the second edition of “The Zincali,” which was written about the time of the issue of the former book. Mr.
Nay, more, it will make us disbelieve the tales in 'The Zincali' and 'The Bible in Spain." Another critic found "a false dream in the place of reality, a shadowy nothing in the place of that something all who had read 'The Bible in Spain' craved and hoped for from his pen."
Another satisfactory side to Borrow's public character, as revealed in "The Zincali," was his contempt for "other nations," such as Spain "a country whose name has long and justly been considered as synonymous with every species of ignorance and barbarism."
In "The Zincali" he has spoken of seeing "Gypsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian and Turkish; and also the legitimate children of most countries of the world": of being "in the shop of an Armenian at Constantinople," and "lately at Janina in Albania." In "The Bible in Spain" he had spoken of "an acquaintance of mine, a Tartar Khan."
Borrow's own account, in his preface to the second edition of "The Zincali," is that the success of that book, and "the voice not only of England but of the greater part of Europe" proclaiming it, astonished him in his "humble retreat" at Oulton. He was, he implies, inclined to be too much elated.
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